http://www.dorkly.com/comic/57350/the-legend-of-zelda-a-break-between-worlds

Awesome Link comic I read on Dorkly today I wanted to share. Funny, sad and true all at the same time.

Don't walk away Link, you need to save Hyrule... again.

After the Starbound beta hit, like many of you, I played the heck out of it. Now that there have been a few game patches and people have tried out the beta, I wanted to ship a few questions over to our friend Curtis Schweitzer, who composed the game score. I was happy to hear that he was interested in talking with us about how things have gone since launch and what we can expect going forward.

jdodson: The Starbound beta has shipped and the reaction seems to be quite good. Right now, Starbound is the number 3 played game on Steam and all those people are listening to your music. How are you processing all of that right now?

Curtis Schweitzer: I'm just enjoying seeing how much people love the game! It is so fun to see this thing that you've been a part of for so long finally get released. Watching streamers figure out little tricks, or discover those little details that Tiy and his team have squirreled away in the hidden parts of the game is really delightful. And of course I'm enjoying seeing so many people liking the soundtrack too! :)

Whiteboyslim: Is there one track in particular that you are especially proud of?

Curtis Schweitzer: Of the new tracks, the Glitch racial theme is my favorite. It is really cinematic, and I was happy to see it get used for the first half of the game's trailer. Made me quite proud!

jdodson: Tim Morrison covered one of your songs “Atlas” on Ukulele and posted it to YouTube. Any fan requests to someone covering one of your songs in any specific way? Mira on flugelhorn perhaps?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjwyfcbKgQc

Curtis Schweitzer: I'd like to hear some piano arrangements of the existing orchestral tracks. My primary interest is piano, so I'd love to see what the fans can come up with. I'm sure it will be amazing!

jdodson: We last talked back in May, I wonder what has been happening in your world since we spoke last? Any new projects we should be looking forward to?

Curtis Schweitzer: I'm working on another game that I can't talk about (yet), but we should be launching a Kickstarter soon! And of course, I'm working on the "Seventh Spectrum" films (www.seventhspectrum.com) too!

jdodson: You are stranded on an alien planet. Strange and new things surround you! You can pick only 3 things to take from your previous life, what do you take? You are already outfitted with your trusty matter manipulator, wheat seeds and a small sword.

Curtis Schweitzer: Well, I'm going to start with that grappling hook. Man, that's awesome. But I supposed I'd also take one of bartwe's instruments, and maybe a hunting bow so that I can get some alien steak for dinner.

jdodson: The Starbound score is now available on Steam for purchase and contains a raft of game music, some of which you can’t hear in the game. Has there been any talk to add more music to Starbound and if so will the official Steam score be updated when this happens?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/268090/

Curtis Schweitzer: We don't have an "official" answer for this, but my inclination right now is to leave this soundtrack "as-is", and if we write more for the game, release it as a "Volume 2". At 5+ hours, I think the first set of music for Starbound is pretty complete.

Whiteboyslim: When we interviewed you back in May you said at the time you had around 5 hours worth of music written for the game. How many hours worth of music did you end up writing?

Curtis Schweitzer: Well, I lost a couple of cues because I was never really happy with them-- the Forest battle stuff always struck me as unbalanced, so I haven't put those on the soundtracks. (You can still hear them on my Soundcloud). The official soundtrack (including my stuff and Solatrus' stuff) is about 5 hours, 44 minutes. So we wrote almost another hour of new stuff, including new racial themes for the Apex, Florans, and some battle music.

jdodson: I want to thank you for taking the time to get back to me Curtis, anything you want to say as you bask in all the Starbound beta launch glory?

Curtis Schweitzer: Its been fun, and I'm looking forward to making new music in the future! I want to compose music as my primary living, and this is a big step toward getting there, so I'm excited what the future holds!

http://curtisschweitzer.com/

If you are interested, you can check out our interview with Curtis back in May:

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1248

After hearing about "the most evil murder simulator ever made" and noticing the shareware version on the shelf for a few bucks, I gave Doom a shot. The graphics, immersion and gameplay blew my mind. The Demons snarling and grunting was really unnerving coming through my sound blaster. Shooting something and watching it explode was extremely satisfying. I also had fun connecting the game over BBS's and LAN for deathmatch.

Doom is one of those games that stamped my brain with what games could be and as such have a huge love for it. When Doom II came out I was very happy with the double barreled shotgun and new creepy levels.

I hope Doom continues to live on and wish iD Software godspeed on Doom 4. They are doing the Lord's work and Doom 4 needs to be awesome and must happen.

Head over to Bethesda's blog and read up on some memories from iD, the Masters of Doom.

http://www.bethblog.com/2013/12/10/happy-20th-doom/

"Game doesn't work for you? Contact our support (http://www.gog.com/support) and tell us to fix it! But what if they cannot find a solution? If such a rare event should occur, we'll give you your money back. Simple as that. If you buy a game on GOG.com and find that it doesn't work properly on your system, and our support cannot fix the problem, you get a full refund. It's a worldwide guarantee, and you have whole 30 days after the purchase date, to contact us about the refund.

There's even more! If you bought a game by mistake, or simply changed your mind about a purchase, you can get a full refund within 14 days, as long as the game wasn't downloaded."

I mention this because it's an interesting move by GOG.com. Currently most digital stores don't offer refunds and I kind of wish some would. In GOG's case, it would be because they couldn't get your game to run or you bought the wrong game and didn't download it. I laud them for doing this, it goes quite a ways to put a "stamp of quality" on things.

I hope things advance beyond this though. It's 2013 and I can return nearly anything I purchase in a store(except food and whatnot) and online. Digital goods? Not so much. I get that because of copying you could still hold on to it after you return it, but why go through that hassle as pirating it is much simpler. That said, there are cases where I would have loved a refund on my money, most notably when the game I bought isn't very good at all.

When I sink $30-$60 on a game and it for lack of a better term.. sucks, I'd love a refund. Slap on a 30 day window, whatever, I'd just love to get my money back. I know developing games is hard, but in a world with few game demos should a gamer pirate a game before they purchase it?

It's awesome to see GOG.com starting to offer a sane refund policy for goods as the video game industry marches ever digitally I hope others take notice and do so likewise.

"Double Fine Adventure" AKA Broken Age is nearing its first half launch and as the release draws near, they are dropping more info nuggets along the way. One such gem features the vocal stylings of the always amazing Wil Wheaton! I grew up watching Wil Wheaton on Star Trek and it's awesome to see him continue his career past the final frontier.

Broken Age will drop on PC, Mac and Linux in 2014.

"So, there's been a ton of debate recently about the resolution disparities of certain games on PlayStation4 and Xbox One, aka RESOLUTION GATE. And this of course follows a long tradition of gamers and marketers obsessing over next-gen graphics. But after taking a look, we began to wonder do great graphics make for a great game? Sure, graphics allow game designers to do amazing things, but what most gamers truly want is IMMERSION - that feeling of being fully sucked into a game. And when we looked at the psychology of immersion, we found that graphics might not be that important :/. In fact, our obsession with graphics might be holding us back from spreading games into other more artistic avenues. So we had to ask how much do graphics really matter?"

Back when graphics were simple, we had a long way to go to make video games better. Not to say Zork didn't have it's place, but nicer graphics are generally a good thing. Does the difference between 1080p and 720p really matter? Well, sure but not by much.

I played Fallout 3 on the PS3 in glorious 720p, would it have been a better game in 1080p? Certain not, but the experience may have been. I don't mind a bit higher resolution on games, I think it can really make for a great experience. That said, Fallout 3 is still an awesome game in 720p so do super fancy graphics really matter?

I would say that largely no, they don't, but impressive visuals can make a game more effective.

Starbound Beta dropped today and I wanted to post a bit about it. First off, the game is quite good for a beta, very well polished and lots of fun. The game isn't perfect though and I have ran into a few bugs already, but for such an early beta, the game is incredible.

Starbound take the formula we all love that was popularized by Minecraft and Terraria and spins it up such that what you are left with is a pretty unique blend of awesome. If you have been following the site for the last few days you have seen me post about the early game and how to start things out. I followed that closely and was able to get started pretty quickly. The game isn't easy to start and I died, a lot. The only penalty for death is losing 30% of your "pixels" (the in game currency) and at first, it might seem like a lot, but pixels are easy to come by.

I moved through the early tiers of the game starting with bronze armor and moving to iron. I have a full Iron Armor set and got a fancy new Iron sword and I can take mostly anything that naturally spawns on the starting planet. I found a army base and was able to take down the inhabitants with only dying a few times. One of the soldiers dropped a pretty weak laser pistol. When I shoot it it uses the green bar energy but doesn't deplete enough to matter as it does so little damage.

After getting the hang of mining I saved up enough coal to hop to a small moon and I decided to do a Let's Play of spelunking around the Moon a bit. I also head back to my starting world in the ship, so if you haven't see how that works you should watch the video above.

Overall the game is very good and I can't wait for it to go live.

**EDIT** I had a few recommendations originally, but as it turns out you can use BOTH coal and wood to fuel your ship. I have no issues with ship fuel anymore, wood and coal are both plentiful.

All that to say, Starbound is in beta and is already fantastic, I can't wait to see what they add before this thing goes live.

The Starbound Trailer just dropped and is pretty awesome. The trailer shows off some early game, building and some other stuff we haven't seen before like mechs, random dungeons and later game tech weapons and gear.

Starbound beta drops tomorrow at 10am PST. Join the Cheerful Ghost event and take part in the discussion about the game and chime in with your thoughts.

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/events/45

Like many of you, I have heard about Lucas Pope's latest game "Papers, Please" and after seeing it in the recent Steam Autumn Sale, I decided to pick it up. The game is very unique and if you are looking for a twitch shooter or MOBA, this ain't it. Papers, Please is a game where you take the role of the immigration inspector on the border reviewing people for entry into the communist state of Arstotzka. You are randomly selected in the state lottery for this job and your family is uprooted and moved to the border. You get money each day by processing people. If you take too long doing your job, you process less people and get less money. If you can't afford heat or food, you family will get sick and may die. If you can't pay your rent you will be thrown in jail.

Papers, Please offers you choices and each choice has an impact that isn't always easy to forsee. In one game, I took a bribe that later got me arrested. In one game, I was moving so slowly I couldn't make rent and was thrown into prison. At one point, a man told me him and his wife were immigrating and that I "should treat her kindly." She didn't have the correct papers and when I let her through, I got a citation that led to a fine.

Papers, Please is a great game in that as I played it I considered what the "right thing to do" was and then what would be the best thing for my family. It's also a strange thing to force someone into a body scanner and analyze the results. On one hand, we have the privacy invasion of body scanners but on the other hand, terrorists are blowing things up at your checkpoint.

Papers, Please is a game I recommend if you are looking for a unique experience that strays away from typical video game tropes. I wasn't sure it was possible to create an exciting game about working at the border of a small communist country, but Papers, Please does it for the glory of Arstotzka!

Solarus is an Open Source Zelda-like 2D game engine. The Solarus engine was built to help people create Zelda like games and the Solarus project released its first game "Zelda Mystery of Solarus" with it.

"The Legend of Zelda: Mystery of Solarus DX is set to be a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES, using the same graphics and game mechanisms. Zelda Mystery of Solarus DX is the first game made with the Solarus engine and in fact, Solarus was primarily designed for this game."

If you are interested in making your own Zelda game or if you are just interested in playing a fan Zelda game directly after the events of Link to the Past, give Solarus a shot.

The Solarus project and Zelda Mystery of Solarus is available for free on Windows, Mac and Linux.

http://www.solarus-games.org/